Statically Typed Metaprogramming?

Question

I\'ve been thinking about what I would miss in porting some Python code to a statically typed language such as F# or Scala; the libraries can be substituted, the conciseness is

Answer 1

So my question is, is this possible?

There are many ways to achieve the same effect in statically-typed programming languages.

You have essentially described the process of doing some term rewriting on a program before executing it. This functionality is perhaps best known in the form of the Lisp macro but some statically typed languages also have macro systems, most notably OCaml's camlp4 macro system which can be used to extend the language.

More generally, you are describing one form of language extensibility. There are many alternatives and different languages provide different techniques. See my blog post Extensibility in Functional Programming for more information. Note that many of these languages are research projects so the motivation is to add novel features and not necessarily good features, so they rarely retrofit good features that were invented elsewhere.

The ML (meta language) family of languages including Standard ML, OCaml and F# were specifically designed for metaprogramming. Consequently, they tend to have awesome support for lexing, parsing, rewriting, interpreting and compiling. However, F# is the most far removed member of this family and lacks the mature tools that languages like OCaml benefit from (e.g. camlp4, ocamllex, dypgen, menhir etc.). F# does have a partial implementation of fslex, fsyacc and a Haskell-inspired parser combinator library called FParsec.

You may well find that the problem you are facing (which you have not described) is better solved using more traditional forms of metaprogramming, most notably a DSL or EDSL.